Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Verbal Art and Systemic Functional Linguistics

Donna R Miller [+–]

University of Bologna

Donna R. Miller holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the Department of modern languages, literatures and cultures of the University of Bologna, where she coordinates its English Language Studies Program and heads the Department’s Centre for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC). Her research has largely focused, in a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective, on register analysis, in institutional text types and verbal art; her corpus-assisted investigations having specifically explored the grammar of evaluation in terms of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS. No stranger to Ruqaiya Hasan’s framework for the study of verbal art, of late Miller has energetically taken up its defence, but has
also been reflecting intensely on Jakobson’s potential place within it. See, e.g.: her 2010 paper “The hasanian framework for the study of ‘verbal art’ revisited… and reproposed”, in Textus XXIII (1); the 2013 article “Another look at Social Semiotic Stylistics: Coupling Hasan’s ‘Verbal Art’ framework with
‘the MukaÅ™ovský-Jakobson theory”, in Gouveia & Alexandre (eds), Languages, Metalanguages, Modalities, Cultures: Functional and socio-discoursive perspectives, Lisbon, and her 2015 essay “Jakobson’s Place in Hasan’s Social Semiotic Stylistics: ‘Pervasive Parallelism’ as Symbolic Articulation of Theme”, in Bowcher & Liang, Society in Language, Language in Society. Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book provides an overview of the dialectic of theory and practice through which SFL positions itself as an appliable linguistics with reference to the theory of Verbal Art. Early chapters sketch a concise history of the linguistic study of literature tout court, as well as the emergence and development of specifically SFL approaches to it and convergences and divergences among approaches. A detailed theoretical description is given of the overall architecture of SSS (Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics), the central descriptive-analytical model created by Ruqaiya Hasan. In addition, the correspondences between Hasan’s framework and what Jakobson theorised as the empirical linguistic evidence of his ‘poetic function’, grammatical parallelism and with what he calls ‘pervasive parallelism’ are delineated. Due attention is also paid to the valuable, if limited, synergy that there is between Corpus Linguistics (CL) and SSS as well as the appliablilty of SSS to translation studies and to EFL. The author also offers views on the possible – and desired –directions that SSS within SFL may take in the future.

Starting with ‘the Mukařovský-Jakobson theory’ (Fowler 1986), delineating Jakobson’s contribution to the thesis and its relevance for SSS. Setting forth correspondences between Hasan’s approach and what Jakobson theorised as the empirical linguistic evidence of his ‘poetic function’: i.e., grammatical parallelism (1960); Arguing that what he calls ‘pervasive parallelism’ (1966) functions just as Hasan says that significant patterning in verbal art must: i.e., as a consistent and motivated foregrounding device which symbolically articulates the theme of the literature text.

Unresolved issues – also vis-à-vis personal considerations concerning the possible and desired future directions that SSS within SFL may take and what may be at stake: the degree of our commitment to a belief in the centrality of language to the study of verbal art and to meticulous linguistic analysis to reveal the functions of language in literature; the rigour, but also rigidity ,of the holistic SSS model.